For the purpose of printing images from a graphical display, such as the display screen of a computer, many such displays are typically only capable of printing binary images. In other words, at each position of the image there are only two possible output states, colorant or no colorant. For example, a traditional graphic arts printing press will either disperse ink or withhold ink at each location of the image. For monochrome imaging systems, this means that an image can only be made up of pixels that are either black or white. To create the illusion of continuous tone images, methods referred to in the art as “halftoning techniques” have been developed. With these techniques, the appearance of intermediate gray levels is created by taking advantage of the fact that the human eye acts as a low-pass filter and will average the intensity over a small local area of the image. It is, therefore, possible to locally vary the ratio between the white area and the black area to form varying levels of gray.
Although, historically, halftone dot patterns were created optically for images made on printing presses, presently the majority of halftone images are created on a computer using one of many presently known and utilized digital halftoning algorithms. Two widely used halftoning algorithms for digital printers, such as laser writers, are generally referred to in the art as periodic dither and error diffusion.
Although halftoning techniques were originally developed for binary output devices, recent developments have made them available for multi-level output devices or, in other words, devices that produce a variety of different colorant levels. (For example see: R. S. Gentile, E. Walowit and J. P. Allebach, “Quantization and multilevel halftoning of color images for near original image quality,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 7, 1019-1026 (1990)). There are several motivations in the art for performing multi-level halftoning. First, some output devices may only be capable of producing a limited set of output colors. For such displays, noticeable artifacts, such as contouring, will result if simple quantization methods are used to produce the image. Contouring is the visible transitions between adjacent output levels that typically result when many input levels are mapped to a single output level.
Multi-level halftoning methods eliminate contouring artifacts by preserving the original average color level in a local image region. In some cases, the number of output colors of the display device is large enough so that contouring does not occur and, as a result, multi-level halftoning is generally not necessary. Even in such a case, there may be advantages to using multi-level halftoning techniques. For example, it may be possible to reduce the amount of RAM required in a printer or the disk-space required for an image file by reducing the number of bits required to store each image pixel. In this case, multi-level halftoning could be considered to be a form of image compression.
Gentile et al. describe generalizations of both the conventional error-diffusion and dither techniques for use with multi-level image displays. They report a number of variations for each technique related to the form of the quantizer which is used to map the input color values to the quantized output color values. In particular, they describe two image independent quantizers, a “RGB cubical quantizer” and an “L*u*v* uniform quantizer.”
The L*u*v* uniform quantizer is implemented by first transforming the input color value to a uniform color space (such as the well-known and standardized CIE-LUW color space) and performing the quantization in that space. The quantized color values must then be transformed to the output color space. An advantage of this method is that the visibility of the halftone patterns will be more uniform across the color space. The primary drawback is that the implementation is much more complex than the simple cubical quantizer due to the fact that transformations into and out of the uniform color space must be calculated for each pixel. These transformations involve either a series of mathematical equations or the use of multi-dimensional look-up tables (LUTs).
Consequently, a need exists for a multi-level halftoning method and apparatus for digital images that are simultaneously simple to compute and which produces halftone patterns having reduced noise.